Day was dying as we rumbled on across the iron bridge above the
river and away into the fresh jungle night along the rock-
ballasted "relocation." The stillness of this less inhabited half
of the Zone settled down inside the car and out, the evening air
of summer caressing almost roughly through the open windows. The
train continued its steady way almost uninterruptedly, for though
new villages were springing up to take the place of the old
sinking into desuetude and the flood along with the abandoned
line, there were but two where once were eight. We paused at the
new Frijoles and the box-car town of Monte Lirio and, skirting on
a higher level with a wide detour on the flanks of thick jungled
and forested hills what is some day to be Gatun Lake, drew up at
7:30 at Gatun.
I wandered and inquired for some time in a black night--for the
moon was on the graveyard shift that week--before I found Gatun
police station on the nose of a breezy knoll. But for "Davie," the
desk-man, who it turned out was also to be my room-mate, and a few
wistful-eyed negroes in the steel-barred room in the center of the
building, the station was deserted. "Circus," said the desk-man
briefly. When I mentioned the matter of weapons he merely repeated
the word with the further information that only the station
commander could issue them.
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